In other words, what we now encounter as “Miao,” “Dong,” “Shui,” or even “Guizhou” and “Southwest experience” should not be understood as self-evident cultural facts awaiting discovery. Rather, they have been continuously produced as legible objects through religion, ethnology, anthropology, folk literature, epic studies, and state-led cultural projects. As Stefan Berger argues in the preface to Writing the Nation, ethnic historical narratives, across different places and periods, have always been closely tied to nation-state building, political legitimacy, and the production of identity, while remaining deeply entangled with the broader processes of modernization.
It is precisely for this reason that the exhibition does not approach Guizhou as an “authentic place” waiting to be revealed. Instead, it is concerned with how local people, navigating the overlapping forces of governance and modernization, have mobilized language as a mediating device through which to actively shape their own lives, memories, relationships, and worlds.
Here, “language” does not refer only to vocabulary, script, or linguistic plurality, but also to acts of notation, translation, copying, transliteration, singing, wedding lament, and dress-making. It functions less as a fixed system of signs than as a mediating mechanism within local society: one that operates at the table, in schools, archives, family museums, and drum towers, while also negotiating everyday relations, the order of life and death, conflict, ethics, and the making of community.
Shimenkan in Weining County, Guizhou, is one of the key entry points for understanding the framework of this exhibition. Before the large-scale arrival of missionaries in the late nineteenth century, many forms of historical memory, myth, ritual custom, and ceremonial knowledge within Miao communities across the borderlands of Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan were primarily transmitted orally. At the same time, however, this is not to say that Guizhou lacked local writing systems altogether: scripts such as Shui writing had long been used in the ritual and everyday lives of other communities in the region. Invited by local residents, the British missionary Samuel Pollard came to Shimenkan, bringing with him not only the collaborative creation of a Miao script, but also a broader transformation of mountain life through close cooperation with those who lived there. Together, they reshaped the spatial and social infrastructure of the area, building churches and establishing the Guanghua School in Shimenkan (Yang, 1933). Classrooms, churches, swimming pools, sports grounds, as well as new systems of writing and education, were introduced into local life as part of this process (Li, 2019; Yuan & Zhu, 2013).
It was also in Shimenkan, 120 years later, that I came to see how Yang Rongxin (1899–1959), born into a peasant family and educated at Shimenkan Guanghua School, became one of a new generation of intellectuals, and how his son Yang Huaming in turn took it upon himself to write, translate, and organize local knowledge. Yang Rongxin participated in the translation of the Bible into Miao, and around the founding of the People’s Republic, he also took part in the collective translation of the Common Program into Miao before being transferred to Beijing to work on Miao-language affairs. He was later arrested on charges such as “colluding with foreign powers” and being an “imperialist running dog,” and died in prison from illness. His A Factual Record of One Hundred Years of Shimenkan, originally written in Miao, was later recopied, organized, preserved, and retranslated into Chinese over the course of several decades by his son Yang Huaming—a student, farmer, temporary laborer, fugitive, collector, and translator (Zhang, 2008). At the same time, Yang Huaming collected a large number of photographs, manuscripts, garments, and other fragmentary historical materials, eventually establishing a family museum. For me, such kind of vernacular translation and archival work differs from both modern academic knowledge production and state-led projects: it carries a more intimate emotional investment and a deeper attachment to place.
Meanwhile, it is in this sense that one might further consider the relationship between The Shape of Language, the residency season developed by Baopu FELT, and the exhibition itself. In its work so far, FELT has used “language” as a way of approaching place and people, inviting artists, researchers, and curators into the local context to examine, through fieldwork, research, and making, how language operates within local society. For me, the relationship between residency and exhibition is not a linear one in which the former provides material and the latter delivers a summary. Nor is a short-term residency sufficient to fully grasp a place as complex as this one, where multiple ethnic worlds and layered histories intersect.
This exhibition is perhaps better understood as an attempt to present the lines, methods, limitations, field perceptions, and unresolved questions that have emerged through this ongoing process of residency, fieldwork, and research. In this sense, FELT’s practice is itself placed within the broader thread of how local people act through “language” as a mediating mechanism—how they build ways of working through which vernacular experience may continue to speak, be translated, reorganized, and made accessible to others. For this reason, the exhibition is also conceived through a more open structure: not as a fixed conclusion, but as an unfolding, process-based channel.
Therefore, to respond to “language” as a theme is no longer simply to describe the forms language assumes. Rather, it is to understand how, in a place repeatedly governed, named, and translated, language might serve as a mediating mechanism that can be mobilized by individuals to shape practice, found schools and archives, create stories, ancestors, and spirits, and organize migration, memory, and future.
In this context, the artists and researchers presented in the exhibition should not be understood as a set of parallel “language cases.” Rather, they suggest distinct ways of entering and working: ways of responding to “language” as a theme, and of understanding how it continues to operate within local social life—through relations, memory, conflict, and forms of organization. On the one hand, the exhibition brings together four resident artists, tracing how each, after entering the field, came to approach and respond to this place in a different way. Xu Xurui gradually lets his initial question of “language and thought” recede, moving instead toward a weaker, more hesitant form of proximity, and toward an experience of wangyan—a state of “forgetting language.” Xu Sanhuang begins with paper pulp, fiber, plants, beeswax, and manual process, allowing body and material, through touch and repetition, to bear the complexity of place and fieldwork. Through workshops, handmade books, and a two-channel video installation, artist duo heeh brings language back to the scene of song, body, looking, and being together. Huang Ruosi, meanwhile, returns images produced through field research to their place of origin, allowing those once photographed to look again at themselves, and in doing so reactivates the relation between looking, memory, and local experience. On the other hand, the exhibition also opens up a space in which FELT itself can be placed under discussion—not as a neutral institutional backdrop, but as a practitioner responding to a further question: what does it mean for language to function as a medium of action?
Likewise, “language” as a mode of action—as a sustained practice—does not unfold only in Shimenkan, or within the residencies organized by Baopu FELT.
In my fieldwork, the question of how language becomes a method of individual action in this place often emerges in moments that are more dispersed, lighter, more plural, and less easily absorbed into grand narratives. In Zaidang’s drum tower, for instance, Teacher Yang and the sisters in the village gather around the fire at night, after the day’s labor, to practice choral singing together. I also heard of another village where someone rewrote a message encouraging residents to purchase health insurance as an al laox song: what could not be persuaded through ordinary speech was, once turned into song, more readily taken in. In a video circulating online, two families had fallen into conflict, and it was only after singers of folk songs were invited to mediate that the dispute was resolved. At another moment, in a restaurant beside a parking lot during one of our field visits, a group of aunties casually began singing newly composed songs while eating, praising the local values they identified with. Or, when visiting a local household, we would hear antiphonal mountain songs arise spontaneously after the meal.
It was also through the embodied experience of fieldwork that I came to sense more deeply that, beyond the languages of modern governance, legal systems, and policy discourse, there remains another expressive system at work locally. It is not simply a matter of “tradition” being preserved; it continues to mediate conflict, persuasion, praise, and reconciliation, to organize forms of community, and to sustain relations between people, as well as between people and place.
Along this thread, the exhibition will also include a special invited section, presenting Mao Chenyu’s long-term fieldwork, reflections, and self-writing practice developed through the thread of “Paddyfilm,” alongside the Easternization Movement’s collection of underground sound and secret texts – as external echoes to the question of language as action.
In the course of fieldwork and research in Guizhou, one repeatedly encounters across the mountains roads of many kinds, industrial ruins, tourism development, intangible heritage ranking systems, livestreaming, the discourse of “a sense of national identity,” and the legacies of borderland governance. If the arrival of modernity was accompanied by the victory of the nation-state (Berger, 2018), then Guizhou is one of the places where that victory has been enacted, layer by layer, within mountain society. What this exhibition seeks to present is neither a Guizhou already named, nor a “correct understanding” of locality. It attempts to make visible the complexities and forces we have encountered here—much of them still resistant to resolution—and, in doing so, to find a more cautious way of drawing near.
Written by Xu Binghuang
其地有言
参展艺术家（*特邀呈现）：古务运动*、heeh（何卉奇、贺天丁）、黄若思、毛晨雨*、许三煌、徐旭睿
策展人：许冰煌
出品人：周然、洪旦
「话外」回应：李心怡、抱朴FELT 部分成员（孙其乐、姜蕴珊）
展览统筹：姜蕴珊
展览助理：高桢桢、彭云杰
海报设计：伍子杰
特别鸣谢：贵州丹寨纸会唱歌工作室（潘玉华、潘洪涛）
展览时间：04/26/2026-06/20/2026
地点：抱朴FELT，贵州凯里市老卫校
展言
1924年，一位法国传教士萨维纳在香港出版《苗族史》[i]，试图为他所理解的“Miao/Hmong”建立一套可追溯的历史叙述；十八年后，迁入西南的大夏大学等机构学者又以《贵州苗夷社会研究》[ii]之名，把“苗夷社会”重新组织成一套可比较、可治理的知识对象。它们都在写“苗（夷）社会”，却来自完全不同的时代位置、制度任务与书写欲望：前者带着宗教与“文明化”的冲动；后者则嵌入抗战救国、社会调查与现代学术的问题化凝视之中。
如果把关于贵州的近现代研究谱系时间线再拉长一些：从19世纪末传教士和西方学者的早期开启，到民国时期西南学术机构、边疆调查和地方志修纂的推进，再到新中国成立后以民族识别、调查和政策为核心的大规模知识生产，最后到1980年代以后不断扩展的苗学、彝学、人类学、非遗整理和地方文献研究——“谁在研究贵州、为什么研究、怎么研究”，本身就是一个历史问题。也就是说，今天我们所面对的“苗族”、“侗族”、“水族”、“贵州或西南经验”，并不是天然在那里等待阅读，而是在宗教、民族学、人类学、民间文学、史诗学和国家文化工程中，被塑造成了可阅读的对象[iii]。正如斯特凡在《书写民族》中所论述的，民族的历史叙事在不同地方和阶段，始终与民族国家建设、政治合法性和身份认同紧密相连（并与现代化的进程相互交织）。
也正因如此，本次展览所试图去呈现的线索——并非将贵州理解为一个等待被揭示的“真实地方”——而更关心：在被各种治理与现代化发展力量推动的过程中，在地的人如何以“语言”作为中介机制，主动构建自己的生活、记忆、关系与世界。
这里的“语言”，不仅是词汇、课程或文字多样性，也包括记音、翻译、转抄、译写、歌唱、哭嫁、服饰创造等动作。它更像一种在地方社会工作的中介机制：它存在于席间、学校、档案馆、家庭博物馆、鼓楼，也处理日常关系、生死秩序、冲突、伦理和和共同体。
贵州威宁县的石门坎是理解此次主题的关键线索之一。[iv]在19世纪末大批传教士到来之前，滇黔川边苗族社会的许多历史记忆、神话、礼俗与仪式知识主要依靠口头传承（与此同时，贵州并非没有地方书写系统，水书等文字早已在其它族群的仪式和生活中长期使用）。来自英国的传教士伯格里（Samuel Pollard）被当地人邀请到此处，带来的不仅是“创制苗文”（与当地人合作）。更因为他与生活在此的人，共同协作改变山地空间，建立教堂、石门坎光华学校[v]。将课室、教堂、泳池、运动场，以及新的书写系统、教学体系等一起带进了地方生活[vi]。
也正是在120年后的石门坎，我看到了农民家庭出身的杨荣新（1899-1959）——在石门坎光华学校接受教育后成为新的知识分子——及其后代杨华明如何自发成为地方知识的撰写者、翻译者与组织者。杨荣新曾参与苗文《圣经》的翻译，又在新中国成立前后联合翻译苗文《共同纲领》，并调入北京从事苗文工作。而后被以“里通外国、帝国主义走狗”等罪名逮捕，病逝狱中。他用苗文写下的《石门坎百年实况录》，后由其儿子杨华明——学生、农民、临时工、逃亡者、收藏者与翻译者——用几十年时间转抄、整理、保存和再译为中文[vii]。同时，杨华明收集大量照片、手稿、服饰和历史碎片的资料，建立家庭博物馆。对于我来说，民间翻译与整理不同于现代学术学科建立与国家行为，带有更强烈的私人情感与对地方的挂念。[viii]
同时，在这个意义上进一步去讨论抱朴（FELT）所推进的“语言的形状”驻地季与“展览”之间的关系。此前，抱朴（FELT）借用“语言”来理解地方与人：邀请艺术家、研究者与策展人进入当地。在田野、研究与创作之中，去辨认语言如何在地方社会里工作。对我来说，驻地与展览之间的关系，并不是“前者提供素材、后者负责总结”的线性结构。并且，短时间驻地也不足以全面深入理解一个多民族、多层历史交叠的复杂地方。
此次展览更像是这一系列驻地田野与研究之下，进一步把当前所看到的线索、方法、局限、田野感知与仍在心中牵挂的问题呈现出来的尝试。而抱朴（FELT）在这里的实践，也被放在了“在地的人如何以‘语言’作为中介机制”去行动的线索中——去建立一种能够让民间经验继续发声、被转译、被重组和被它人进入的工作方式。正因此，也期望展览能以一种更开放的结构来规划，一个正在发生中的、过程性的通道。
所以，回应“语言”这个主题的方式，也不再只是去描述语言有怎样的形式，而是去理解：在这样一个被层层治理、命名和转译的地方，语言如何（可能）作为一种个人可调动的中介机制，帮助人构建实践、创建学校、档案、故事、祖先与亡灵，组织迁徙、记忆与未来。
在这样的背景下，展览中呈现的艺术家与研究者，也不应被看作几个并列的“语言案例”，而更像是几种不同的进入方式与工作方法：它们如何通过不同动作，去回应“语言”这一主题；如何在具体的地方社会里理解它，经验它仍发生在关系、记忆、冲突与组织方式之中。一方面，展览将呈现四位驻地艺术家在进入田野后，如何沿着各自不同的方式去理解并回应这个地方——徐旭睿逐渐把最初关于“语言—思想”的提问，退到一种更弱、更迟疑的靠近，以及对“忘言”状态的体会；许三煌则从纸浆、纤维、植物、蜂蜡与手工过程出发，在触摸和反复的手作中，让身体与材料去承载那些地方与田野的复杂性；heeh通过工作坊、手工书和双屏影像，将语言重新带回歌声、身体、观看和相处的现场；黄若思则将田野调查中所拍摄的影像带回原地，让曾被拍摄的人重新观看自己，让观看、记忆与地方经验重新发生关系。
另一方面，展览亦设置“话外”回应的部分，集中呈现那些在田野与研究过程中被捕捉到、却尚未完成处理的材料、问题与感受——它们以笔记、影像、制图与装置等不同形态出现。比如，李心怡将以多幕结构展开其田野记录，从书写误读、语言转写到身体与地理感知之间的断裂与重组。同时也为抱朴（FELT）提供一个讨论的位置：不是作为中性的背景机构，而是作为一个实践者，去回应“语言作为一种行动的媒介，是什么？”基于这个提问，她们将通过“共构地图”等方式，将驻地过程中被激活的地点、路径与关系叠加为一个持续生成的问题网络。
同样的，“语言”作为行动的方式——一种持续的实践——并不只发生在石门坎，或者抱朴（FELT）策划的驻地里。
在我的田野调查中，“语言如何在此地成为个体行动的方法”，往往是更多更散、更轻、更多元，也更难被写进宏大叙事的时刻。比如在宰荡鼓楼里，杨老师与村里的姐妹在日常劳作之后，夜晚围着火堆一同练习合唱；听闻，在另一个乡村里，有人把劝村民购买医保的话改写成大歌去唱，原本说服不了的事，换成歌唱之后反而被听了进去；网络中流传的一个视频，影像中两家人起了冲突，最后竟是请来会唱民歌的人调停，纠纷才得以化解。又比如某一次我们田野现场停车场旁边的餐馆里，一群孃孃在吃饭的地方随意起唱新编的歌，去歌颂她们认同的地方价值；或者是做客到当地人家，在饭后听她们随意兴起的山歌对唱……
也正是身体在场的田野经验，使得我进一步感受到：在现代治理语言、法律系统、政策话语之外，地方仍然保有另一种表达系统，它不只是“传统保留”，而是仍然在处理矛盾、说服、赞颂、调解，在组织共同体，也串联不同的人与人、人与地方之间的关系。
沿着这条线索，现场还会设置一个“特邀单元”——呈现毛晨雨以“稻电影”为线索展开的长期田野作业、反思与自我写作实践，以及古务运动对地下音声与秘密文本的采集，作为与“语言作为行动”互相照亮的外部回声。
在贵州田野及调查的过程中，总是能在不同山间看到形态各异的道路、工业遗迹、旅游开发、非遗评级、直播、“共同体意识”话语，及边地治理留下的遗产……如果说现代性的来临伴随着民族国家的胜利[ix]，那么贵州便是这场胜利如何在山地社会中层层落实的现场之一。这次展览要呈现的，不是一个已经完成命名的贵州，也不是一种关于地方性的“正确理解”。而是希望去呈现我们在这里所感受到的、种种无法处理的复杂性与力量，并找到一种更谨慎的靠近。
文/许冰煌
注：本文的书写，得益于抱朴（FELT）所组织的系列驻地活动，及其驻地项目研究员孙其乐与“共处计划”发起人李心怡所慷慨分享的田野调查、研究。以及“垰白”和“器·Haus空间”在2025年9月所联合发起（抱朴FELT协同）的“贵阳-安顺-威宁-石门坎行走计划”。在此一并感谢！另，展览名称英文翻译受启发于Bindi Vora所策划的“I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies”（2026, UK）。
[i] [法]萨维纳（François Marie Savina）著：Histoire des Miao, Imprimerie de Nazareth，香港，1924年。
[ii] 吴泽霖、陈国钧等著：《贵州苗夷社会研究》，北京：民族出版社，2003年。
[iii] 《国际视野中的贵州人类学》编委会，苗学辑[M]，贵阳：贵州大学出版社，2009-2014年；杨昌儒、卢云辉主编：《贵州世居民族文献与文化研究》，上海：上海古籍出版社，2016年；王明珂著：《华夏边缘：历史记忆与族群认同》，上海：上海人民出版社，2020年。
[iv] 另，在简美玲所撰写的“书写的主体性与社会理想”中，通过歌师Sangt Jingb去讨论了记音、翻译与民族志文化理解之间的关联。《贵州东部村寨无语：Humb人的日常、情感及语言》，國立陽明交通大學出版社，2022年。
[v] 杨荣新著，杨华明编：《石门坎百年实况录》，1903-1952年（苗文）、2015年（中文），自出版。
[vi] 李香红著：《抗战时期石门坎边民的国家认同教育研究》，《民族教育研究》，第4期第30卷，第100–106页，2019年；袁振杰、朱竑著：《跨地方对话与地方重构——从“炼狱”到“天堂”的石门坎》，《人文地理》第2期，第53–60页，2013年。
[vii] 张霜著：《民族学校教育中的文化适应研究——贵州石门坎苗族百年学校教育人类学个案考察》[D]，中央民族大学，2008年。
[viii] 同时需要注意的是，石门坎，它既是教会档案中的边地奇迹，也是国民教育与国家认同争夺解释权的空间；既是后来贵州苗学/人类学反复回望的“前哨基地”，也是在政治运动中失落、被迫沉默、又由地方人重新捡拾起来的现场。同上。
[ix] [德]贝格尔·斯特凡（Stefan Berger）主编、孟钟捷译：《书写民族: 一种全球视角》，杭州：浙江大学出版社，2018年，第1-47页。